A Three-Turtle Summer: A Battered Wife Starts a New Life

by Janelle Meraz Hooper

2002 1st Place Fiction, Bold Media Book AwardFort Sill, Oklahoma, 1949…Hispanic Grace and her five-year-old daughter, Glory, are living through A Three-Turtle Summer—a summer so hot Glory's pet turtles are dying. It’s also the summer that Grace’s sisters and mother join forces with Grace to help her dump Dwayne, her abusive husband, who her sister Pauline says is “meaner than a rattlesnake and dumber than adobe.” Besides her Hispanic family, a rich list of characters also assist in her escape, Sako, an American-born Japanese neighbor, whose former home was the internment camp at Poston, Arizona; two gay dance instructors; a Negro gospel singer who sells lip-smackin’ Barbecue out of the trunk of her new orange Cadillac convertible; and Rudolf, her older sister’s husband who’s a colonel in the Army. This women’s fiction story, set in Southwest Oklahoma, will appeal to women everywhere who are looking for a good story with a happy ending. A Three-Turtle Summer was the winner of the 2002 Bold Media Award for fiction. This book is more accurately a fictional autobiography of my childhood in Oklahoma.

337 pages, Kindle Edition

First published August 4, 2002

About the author

Thanks for stopping by!
It’s no accident that many of my pieces have a Southwest flavor. An Anglo-Hispanic, I grew up in Lawton, Oklahoma, close to the Fort Sill Indian Reservation where Geronimo and other Indians were imprisoned, and my writing is colored with my experiences growing up so close to Indigenous Peoples’ cultures. I call them modern-day cowboy and Indian Westerns.
I am not a formula writer, so each book is written with the voice, color. and texture needed to enhance the story.

Leave me a message and say hello! Janelle

Reviews

[Murielle Cyr · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a gripping story of domestic abuse fuelled by the high level of racism existing in Oklahoma in the late forties. It documents the cruelties suffered by the Hispanic, Japanese and African American of that era.
Grace, the youngest daughter of a close-knit Hispanic family, lives in constant terror of being assaulted by her bigoted, mean-spirited husband, Dwayne. She suffers her beatings in silence fearing he will take her daughter, Glory, away from her. Grace is a talented seamstress and with the help of her family devises a plan to be free of her abuser while he is away on military leave.
The characters are fleshed out and the action is fast paced and full of suspense. This is a terrific read that offers hope to the victims of abuse and racism. Well done !

[Val · Rating 5 out of 5]

The first of a trilogy that covers a little girl growing up in Oklahoma with a zany family. Her dad, a soldier bats around his women while her mother looks for ways out. The turtles? If you've ever been to Oklahoma in the summertime, you'll remember the heat. Even the turtles can't live through it. The summer Glory watched her mother cleverly come up with a means of supporting them is fun to watch, although it took three turtles to survive.